[An analysis of the articles published in Revista Medico-Chirurgicală over the last 7 years].
BACKGROUND
As the number of medical journals is continuously increasing, their quality becomes a very reliable tool used by the editors in order to increase readership. As a consequence, the structure and the content of submitted papers are carefully revised before publication.


OBJECTIVE
The purpose of our study is to describe structural aspects and the use of descriptive and inferential statistics methods in papers published by the Medical-Surgical Journal between 1990 and 1997.


METHODS
Fifteen items were collected for each paper. Ten of them were related to the general structure: type of paper, number of authors, town of authors, professional environment, medical topic covered by the paper, pluridisciplinarity, the existence of a bibliography, the number of titles in the bibliography, language of publication, presence of abstract. The other five were related to data analysis and reporting: description of statistical methods, the existence of significant results without method description, presence of tables and graphics, use of descriptive and inferential statistics.


RESULTS
A number of 477 papers were analysed. Original papers represented 57.4%, 71.5% of the authors were involved in medical/non-medical teaching, 58.3% of papers were related to clinical sciences, 29.8% were related to basic medical sciences; pluridisciplinarity was present in 26.8% of papers (significantly increasing trend, p < 0.01), the bibliography was not present in 27.3% of papers (significantly decreasing trend, p < 0.001), romanian was the language of publication in 83% of papers, followed by english (10.9%), french (4.6%) and german (1.5%). Papers without abstract represented 29.9%, the median number of authors is 3(range 1-15) and the mean number of titles in reference list 14.7(SD = 12). Eighteen papers (3.8%) reported significant results without description of methods, 51.4% used tables and graphics, 13.4% used descriptive statistics methods and only 6.9% of the papers have used inferential statistics methods.


CONCLUSIONS
The structural problems of papers published in Medical Surgical Journal should be avoided using a more restrictive editorial policy. The use of such a policy shows positive results for the last 2 years (1995 and 1996). Statistical methods are poorly used in this Romanian medical journal and much progress is to be made before speaking about statistical assessment of submitted papers.
Toma
C
C
Disciplina Farmacologie si Toxicologie, Facultatea de Medicină, Universitatea de Medicină şi Farmacie Gr. T. Popa, Iaşi.
Bredetean
O
O
Stanciu
V V
VV
Stefănescu
C
C
D010506:Periodicals as Topic / Q000592:standards / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011786:Quality Control; D012383:Romania; D012955:Societies, Medical
O analiză a articolelor publicate în Revista Medico-Chirurgicală din ultimii 7 ani.